The Influence of Organizational Life Cycle on Environmental Proactivity and Competitive Advantage

Abstract

In today's dynamic environment, it is extremely important to study the circumstances in which environmental management contributes to a firm's competitiveness. Relying on the dynamic capabilities view, this study empirically examines the relationships between environmental proactivity, organizational life cycle stages, competitive advantage, and industry on a sample of 155 Australian firms. The results of a regression analysis show that the construct of the organizational life cycle is significantly related to environmental proactivity. The results also confirm the well-established positive impact of environmental proactivity on competitive advantage. Surprisingly, we found environmental proactivity was positively related to competitive advantage not only in the innovative stages but also in the conservative ones. Our findings reveal the complex nature of environmental proactivity and help better understand the relationship between environmental proactivity and competitive advantage.

The Links between Proactive Environmental Strategy, Competitive Advantages and Firm Performance: An Empirical Study in Vietnam

“…The research line on the relationship between environmental strategy and firm performance examines various measures of firm performance [19]. A number of scholars measure firm performance of pursuing environmental strategies using financial performance indicators [11,[20][21][22][23][24] and environmental performance indicators [9,15,20,[24][25][26]. Other authors believe measures of firm performance involve not only financial and environmental performance but also operational performance [27,28], market performance [25,29,30] or marketing performance [31].…”

The antecedent and performance of environmental managers’ proactive pollution reduction behavior in Chinese manufacturing firms: Insight from the proactive behavior theory

“…Further, according to Hart (1995) and Primc and Čater (2016), PEMB can also improve firms' strategic competitiveness (SC) that is mainly reflected in the expansion of market shares, broader financing channels and improvement of firms' reputation. Many Chinese manufacturers are largely dominated by state-owned shares, which indicates their significant impact on national economy.…”

“…The remarkable progress at the policy level is that governments began to emphasize the driving effect of managers' psychological motivation in enhancing the effectiveness of environmental regulations (Campbell, 2007;Etzion, 2007;Papagiannakis and Lioukas, 2012). Since around 2000s, jointly driven by firms' operation demands and external pressures, researchers began to focus on firms' proactive environmental management behavior (PEMB), including proactive environmental strategy (Aragón-Correa and Sharma, 2003;Aragón-Correa and Rubio-López, 2007) and environmental proactivity González-Benito, 2005, 2006;Calza et al, 2016;Primc and Čater, 2016), to advocate voluntarily reducing the negative impact of their operations on the natural environment.…”

A conceptual framework

“…These scholars reveal why some organizations hold on to ecologically responsible behaviors using technological methods and processes, although some companies are seemingly in the same situations and testing or not observing rules and laws that existed already (González-Benito and González-Benito, 2006;Ormazabal et al, 2017). Thus, figure out the significant of taking into account the different levels of why companies adopt as well as develop their environmental management activities (Maialle and Jabbour, 2014;Ormazabal and Sarriegi, 2014;Ormazabal et al, 2015;Primc and Čater, 2016). There are many classifications and methods that have been asserted to examine corporate environmental management activities.…”